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If they call GW2 innovative then it's maybe the best for all if the MMO genre dies. The quicker the better. Honestly, all that p2w generic garbage has to go. Maybe someone in far future comes out with a new and fun MMO and generates enough money to revive the genre?

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Originally posted by SereneBlue

Originally posted by Torluk

Originally posted by SereneBlue

The trend that INVESTORS are making (allocating their money on which products/categories, etc they think shows upward growth) is trending away from MMOs and traditional console games and toward cellphone games and facebook type games.

But is that really the case? Or is money that would never have been available to invest in MMORPGs anyway being invested in these other areas? Both areas are video games but they are not like for like investment opportunities.

If the investors who are throwing money at social and mobile games wouldn't have invested in more traditional video games then it's not really a problem. If it is a significant part of the pot that used to fund more traditional games then it would be concerning.

He never directly answers your question but he definitely implies that it is a re-direction of capital rather than an avalanche of never-before-seen capital (although I'm sure he would admit at least some of it is new capital as well). But he doesn't make these arguments if it were only NEW capital. I mean...he even Titled his paper The Death of MMOs (a step I did not go so far as to make in my own headline in this thread).

Here's some quotes from some of his papers and comments. And mind you - he is an industry insider who is getting commentary from fellow industry insiders. At the very least he *isn't* like the folks here on this board (the typical gamer who doesn't help to create an MMO as his/her day job).

*******QUOTE***********

As a general rule, games are not made by designers, programmers, or artists. They are made by investors. All of the games in the social network space currently are either single player games, small group games, or multiplayer “pay to win”/ante games as I describe in my “How “Pay to Win” Works” paper. There are no massively multiplayer games at all in either the social network or mobile space currently. If investors keep making more of these, they won’t make any more [new] MMO’s.

In my eyes, the last successful MMO’s, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, EVE Online, and Final Fantasy XI, were all made almost ten years ago. EA’s recent Star Wars:The Old Republic is more of a massively single player game than an MMO, and would have been more successful if designed as such. The only two recent multiplayer products to have found a way around both the classic subscription and microtransaction monetization models are Wargaming.net’s World of Tanks and RIOT Games’ League of Legends products. What makes these games different from their competition is explained in my upcoming Supremacy Goods paper. These small scale match-based games are still not what I would describe as an MMO. The scale is too small and without an understanding of what makes these games successful, investors will not fund more complex versions of these. Even if they did, these two titles bypass the weaknesses in their models by not permitting most forms of social interaction. Thus they would not scale up in an elegant fashion.

For gamers, the social game revolution peaked some time around 2003-2004, and it has been downhill since then. As investors pull the plug on massively social games and move their resources to social network games (not the same thing), gamers are going to have to endure an extended “Dark Age” while investors unsuccessfully attempt to give us what we want. I would think that the ante game bubble will burst severely, and soon, and then perhaps a new Golden Age of social gaming will be born on the other side. The risk is that as investors catch fire during the bubble burst, they will reallocate their resources to other industries, thinking ours is “too high risk”.

*******

And some others:

******QUOTE**********

In about 2 years there will be very little market for ante games (My Note: this is his word for P2W monetization schemes in MMOs whether western or asian). The only people still playing them will be those that prefer ante games, which is at most 2% of the consumer base. The other problem here is that those that prefer ante games only like them when they are not populated with others that like ante games. If they are, they experience competition and uncertainty as to outcome, and the price of winning the ante game can be much higher. So if you lump all these people together into one game, it suddenly becomes a lot less attractive to them.

To a fellow game developer who commented on his paper:

*****QUOTE********

I am not sure I got your central theme, but you make a good point that those on good projects tend to get good skills. In theory they could make even better games on the next pass. There are two things preventing this:

1. There is this axiom, I forgot who came up with it, that people tend to be promoted until they are no longer qualified for the positions they are in. In this case, the best people will eventually get promoted to places where they are no longer skilled while at the same time their egos get so big (along with their paychecks) that they don’t want to admit the situation. I see this all the time.

2. These games I mentioned were all great games that were poorly monetized. This usually means that money that customers would have liked to spend on the product instead went to the grey market, which actually hurts the game directly in addition to representing lost revenue. This issue of lost monetization is what spurred my research in this field starting in 2005. Overcoming these systemic issues can lead to games that monetize two to four times as high, allowing much more elaborate products to be built."

********

*****QUOTE*******

I would suggest that the Peter Principle kicks in even faster than normal in this industry, especially when you realize that the average working life span of people in the IM industry is 3.5 years. Turnover is massive. The industry is growing so fast that there is a lot of opportunity for advancement, possibly too much. Getting your foot in the door is the hard part. I attribute the high turnover rate to people thinking that game development is “fun”, and not realizing just what a grind it is, especially for lower level employees. Hours are very long and there are always 50 people who would love your job. I intentionally skipped a lot of that by training myself with skills that did not exist in the industry but that I predicted would be in demand before their existence.

**************

And here was a surprisingly nice comment he made about GAMERS vis-a-vis Game Designers (of all things...)

****QUOTE*****

I should have been more clear before I started making generalizations about gamers. If you want to include ALL gamers, that is a huge slice of society now. But… that slice does not make games. Every interview I have walked into in the last year, and every game design session I have ever had in my entire life, has been all male. I am usually the oldest guy in the room (been a few exceptions). Most studios have VERY few women, and they are almost always in “grunt” (non decision-making) position.

This is our industry, and I don’t like it because it means we make games for the people making games, not the people playing games, which is two very different groups. The people making games, I would propose, have lower social skills than those playing them on average.

********

Thanks for the reply SereneBlue. He certainly has more direct experience with the industry than I do and raises some interesting questions.

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The way it's framed is a bit misleading. In essence if one MMO took 7 years and cost 100 million dollars to make it would only show 14 million as a "new IP". Plus, I'm no expert but I don't think a large amount of the total cost is spent up front. Facebook games on the other hand have a much shorter turn around time so the cost isn't spread over so many years.

I think the twilight for the kind of MMO being released is coming and not a moment too soon. Don't blame WoW, they're giving people what they want and those people gobble it up. Blame the companies who tried to emulate the same thing unsuccessfully instead of creating something original.

There are games coming down the line that should be a bit different and could break us our if the funk. A few have been mentioned already but EQN and Titan are the two hopefuls for me. We shall see.

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Thanks for the reply SereneBlue. He certainly has more direct experience with the industry than I do and raises some interesting questions.

I hope he's wrong but I wouldn't be shocked if he was right.

Thank you.

Yeah. I know what you mean. It would've been more helpful if - like you said - he'd mentioned the amount of capital invested between say 2004 - 2009 and now for comparison. But I figure he left it out since really his papers and research were meant for other MMO developers and those guys probably are all too aware of how the winds blow when it comes to the latest trends in investor money.

What had me even more bummed out from his research on the industry is that this redirecting of capital is not only affecting MMOs it's affecting traditional single-player pc/console games too. MMOs and console games are fighting for the same table scraps (13%).

I know some people in this thread say let the fans start crowdfunding games and while that may be possible for single player games (most likely PC only ones) I don't see it quite as likely for multiplatform console games or MMOs. Obsidian got lucky enough to raise over 2 mil for their single player PC only rpg. But they've said there will be zero online component for that game (costs way too much and increases game complexity by going multi-player).

Console games cost even more than single-player PC only games from what I understand so they're even less likely to be crowdfunded to an adequate level.

MMOs are the most expensive of all. It's one thing to raise 2 mil on kickstarter. Quite another to successfully raise 20 mil or more.

After 2014/2015 we may be in for a long decade of mostly localized Asian grinders to fill out the AAA MMO category for anything new and different.

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The only reason you need to worry about where investors are puting money is because most of that is for small companys. Companys like SOE are already developing new MMOs and will continnue to do so because it makes money.

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As far as I'm concerned the genre has been in the dark ages for many years now, so I consider the idea of a bubble crash and burn as a good thing.

It will open up the MMO space more to Indy Devs who seem to have far more interesting ideas in flight than the major investor lead houses, and players who enjoy the genre will have no choice but to support them long enough until they get their titles fleshed out properly.

Many of the early MMO's release in pretty rough shape, UO was "Coaster of the Year" in one computer gaming mags review, Anarchy Online was horribly bug shot, DAOC I believe launched with only 20 levels and quickly pushed it up to 50 in the first few months. EVE, same deal, was lucky to have 35K subs at launch but today, over 300K

Yet in every case, those early games turned out to be real gems to play over the long haul and most folks stuck with them for quite some time.

Today's player base expects far more polish and content than that, but I'm starting to believe that once you try to go down that path, the costs balloon out of control making MMO'S far too risky to deviate from proven past successes. (at least in the eyes of investors)

So I say let the crash commence, and out of the ashes hopefully we'll see a rebirth of new ideas or at least a repackaging of some older designs that were never expanded upon from their early inception.

And if not...well as far as I'm concerned, nothing really lost then, the genre might as well go away.

Besides, there will probably always be EVE.

The rest of you, can probably go play WOW expansion number 23 or whatever.

In my day MMORPG's were so hard we fought our way through dungeons in the snow, uphill both ways."I don't have one life, I have many lives" - GruntyStill currently "subscribed" to EVE, and only EVE!!!"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon

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Zenimax (parent company also owns bethesda) is making elder scrolls online, blizzard have project titan, SOE works on planetside 2 and EQ next, Carbine (ncsoft) is making wildstar, Trion is working on defiance and end of nations, CCP is working on dust514 (world of darkness looks far away atm). You also have Blade&soul and archeage coming to the west, neverwinter, firefall, mechwarrior online, df:UW and plenty of new indie companies coming up with sandboxes.

Social networking games and mobile games is a fast growing market but its growth is not at the cost of traditional MMO's, instead its a new market aiming for people that are not traditional gamers.

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As far as I'm concerned the genre has been in the dark ages for many years now, so I consider the idea of a bubble crash and burn as a good thing.

It will open up the MMO space more to Indy Devs who seem to have far more interesting ideas in flight than the major investor lead houses, and players who enjoy the genre will have no choice but to support them long enough until they get their titles fleshed out properly.

Many of the early MMO's release in pretty rough shape, UO was "Coaster of the Year" in one computer gaming mags review, Anarchy Online was horribly bug shot, DAOC I believe launched with only 20 levels and quickly pushed it up to 50 in the first few months. EVE, same deal, was lucky to have 35K subs at launch but today, over 300K

Yet in every case, those early games turned out to be real gems to play over the long haul and most folks stuck with them for quite some time.

Today's player base expects far more polish and content than that, but I'm starting to believe that once you try to go down that path, the costs balloon out of control making MMO'S far too risky to deviate from proven past successes. (at least in the eyes of investors)

So I say let the crash commence, and out of the ashes hopefully we'll see a rebirth of new ideas or at least a repackaging of some older designs that were never expanded upon from their early inception.

And if not...well as far as I'm concerned, nothing really lost then, the genre might as well go away.

Besides, there will probably always be EVE.

The rest of you, can probably go play WOW expansion number 23 or whatever.

+1

Apart of EvE thing. Good game but I don't dig playing in space. So my 'safe-net' is single player games and non-computer /video-games activities.

Originally posted by PresbytierI have never met a community of gamers more morbidly obsessed with an unfounded belief in their own demise than MMORPG players. I mean seriously I don't get the general doom and gloom MMORPG players posses; sometimes that alon makes me want to quit playing MMORPGs.

In no other genre has there been such a sharp and sudden decline in the quality of products. Not only that, but out of all the genres, MMORPGs had the most potential to do amazing mind blowing things. And they did, at first. Then after 2004 that all stopped.

Their has not been a sharp decline in quality Oh by god yes there has The quality is on par with other genres of gaming. There are a great deal of crap out there, but that is not unique to MMOs. No, what's unique to MMOs is when 100% of the AAA titles are all so identical to eachother that its hard to tell them apart. What is unique is the ever increasing snobbery and self entitlemnt of the player base. Yeah people tend to get upset when developers continuously make really bad games. i believe this is do to the intrensic nature of the internet and the fact that MMOs are directly connected with it. I think it has to do with the fact that we've had TWO MMORPG releases from AAA companies in the last 8 years that weren't shot for shot clones of WoW. TWO. Lets face it internet anonimity is the real issue if people had to face the consequances of the things they said then much of the attitude and problems with the internet and in turn MMos would go away.What is really amazing is the complete stupidity and idiocy(yes i actually said some people are stupid) people demonstrate in regards to WoW and many current MMOs. Well when you insult WOW you kind of insult them all considering how similar they are. not everyone apes WoW and even games that play similarly are different enough to not be WoW clones Ha, yeah I bet AoC, LotRO, and Rift aren't WoW clones with one gimmick thumb tacked on, right? . The WoW clones line is more of a myth than fact Incorrect.; WoW plays very similarly to early MMOs Holy shit you couldn't be more wrong. WoW is the antithesis of early MMOs. and what we see is just a continued evolution of the genres as a whole.

Evolution would be nice. But devolution is more accurate.

And this a great example of someone simply incapable of making an argument. i9nstead of ingaging my points you simply stuck your head in the air and declared "nanana boo boo you are wrong and I am right". I mean come on try to show how WoW is not similar to EQ. I did, you didn't quote it. WoW was very clearly based on EQ but the two had entirely different philosophies. What's more, EQ wasn't the only pre WoW MMO. What this really is is you your one specific ideal MMO has never been released It has, actually. so you get in a tizzy every time a new one comes out. other than really Rift and maybe even SW:TOR there have not been that many WoW clones You're forgetting WAR's PvE, LotRO, and AoC, aren't you? (and even those games have enought to destinguish them from WoW haha, no not really. Rifts had the event system from Tabula Rasa stapled onto their game, but that's about it. It may seem like enough to you, but those of us who are used to how vastly different each and every pre WoW MMO was from one another, it amounts to almost nothing. Hell, Rift even has the same UI and graphics as WoW. ). So please show me the WoW clones, actually explain how they clone WoW, then try to explain how that is any different from how WoW built off of EQ or any earlier MMOs.

All the MMOs I mention share the same class system (except Rift), the same type of gear grind, the same quest based leveling system, the same GUI, the same tiered raiding system, the same focus on instancing and singleplayer gameplay, the same lack of any kind of depth, same casual focus by putting in global auction houses, no death penalty, GPS auto maps that tell you how to do quests, sparkling objectives, !! over NPC heads... they're all cast from the same mold, and its very clear.

EQ had a similar class system to WoW (except all of EQ's classes had a TON of fluff abilities and player interdependent abilities) and WoW's raid system was based off EQ's raid system (both were terrible). That's about where the similarities end. EQ's world was without instances, focused on long long term leveling, group based content, shared content, player interdependency, immersion and player reliance over convenience, and each and every piece of the game just had more effort put into it. Quests in EQ involved actually typing and talking to the NPCs, there were little details in each system that didn't have to be there, more fluff in general. It feels like the difference between an adults house, and a house with a toddler in it, that has everything covered in safety gates and padded.

I quoted everything you typed, but it sure is nice to see you completely backpedaled claim that WoW and EQ had no similarities. As far as your other point they mount to the equivalent of "OH MY GOD THESE GAMES HAVE GRAPHICS AND QUESTING!!!!MUST BE A WOW CLONE!!!!"

"Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."-Guybrush Threepwood"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."-Hunter S. Thompson

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Originally posted by smh_alotI didn't read the articles - will do so later - but hmm, I don't know. Personally, I think we'll see a new dawn for MMO's after years of 'dark ages' in a sense.

When WoW goes down (please note fanboys: not saying that's any time soon, merely recognizing the inevitability), we're going to have a hungry herd the likes of which we've not before seen.

You can probably sell the Eskimos some ice cubes, when conditions are just right.

Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

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Originally posted by SereneBlue

Read an interesting paper by a guy in the gaming industry. He specifically specializes in MMOs - especially how in-game economies work (or more usually don't) as well as the problems MMOs currently have these days with retaining players past a few months beyond a small, dedicated fandom.

Anyway what he said had me wondering if within the next 3-4 years we will enter a period where no more Western dev'd MMOs will be made and it will only be ports/localizations of Asian MMOs. He specifically mentioned 2011 investor numbers in games.

Here was the 2011 industry break down for investing in new game IPs for various platforms.

57% of all investor money went into social networking games (ex: Facebook, etc)

30% went into mobile games (cellphones, tablet)

the remainder was divided up among everything else - traditional console games and traditional style MMOs

MMOs post-2004 (outside a handful) have a troubled history with the subscription model of supporting the games made.

Basically MMOs and traditional single-player/co-op PC/Console games are fighting for the remaining scraps of investor dollars (13%) that are left over from the other two categories for anything new. Current stuff in development won't be affected but anything actually NEW (as in the idea was being pitched to investors in 2011/2012 for the first time) is fighting over that remaining 13%.

I wonder if MMO fans post 2014 are in for a long draught of new MMO IPs (assuming if what he states is true). If it is - and we are in for a long draught - are there any current western-dev'd MMOs you would reconsider playing? He doesn't mention Asian MMOs in his article and I'm assuming Asian MMOs during this "draught" would continue to be ported/translated into Western markets.

Here's another one he wrote posted to Gamasutra on the errors he saw made in SWTOR. Both this article and the comments by game developers (and his replies to them) are also worth checking out.

Yes, I mentioned in another discussion on this site how companies don't want to invest in MMOs anymore because the returns aren't there. Being the typical forum people they are they all shouted for me to show proof or I was full of it when simple google searches can tell them what they want to know.

Companies are definetly moving away from MMOs. They cost a lot to make and 3 months in you have at most a third of the players you had at launch day so it becomes so very hard for them to get all the investment back let alone make a profit. From the day the game launches they are funding making new content and a new expansion, all of which is a cost. So those month to month payments aren't just profit like a lot of players think.

Now players want to get into the games for free (there's 50-60 bucks per player lost which can easily equate to over $100 million less than they would normally bring in) and they want to get everything in game for free. If the companies put things you HAVE to buy then players revolt because for some reason everything in the world should be free.

The era of MMOs peaked 6-8 years ago, it has been downhill since. More competition combined with far less player loyalty to a specific game has erroded away any profitability the genre had. Some small indie companies will keep trying, but as it is only 10-30k people pick up an indie MMO so it isn't exactly big business.

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Certainly not going to be a drought in the next year. Titan is also on the horizon.

I do think new AAA MMOs are in trouble though. It's just too expensive and you really need to get so many things right. They will be released much less frequently in the future until someone blows the lid off and finds a formula to match WOWs ten million players..

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Originally posted by FrodoFragins

Certainly not going to be a drought in the next year. Titan is also on the horizon.

I do think new AAA MMOs are in trouble though. It's just too expensive and you really need to get so many things right. They will be released much less frequently in the future until someone blows the lid off and finds a formula to match WOWs ten million players..

There is no "magic formula" and people should stop trying to find one. One's big success was almost entirely timing based. It was the first MMORPG from a well established dev with a huge fan base and the first one to spend a year on marketing to non MMO players pre launch.

Once that audience is hooked you can't catch them again. WoW keeps going through momentum, not its "formula". Its Formula is the same as EQ's.

Over the years Blizzard has shown they don't know anything about running an MMO, so I wouldn't expect much from Titan.

AAA MMORPG devs would do much better if they scaled back their budget a bit and started aiming at the untapped "niches" out there, like the hardcore MMORPG player base, or the sandbox players. Look at how much Dark Souls had by making an incredibly hardcore game and aimed it at an untapped market. That's how WoW succeeded, being the first big budget casual game.

Originally posted by PresbytierI have never met a community of gamers more morbidly obsessed with an unfounded belief in their own demise than MMORPG players. I mean seriously I don't get the general doom and gloom MMORPG players posses; sometimes that alon makes me want to quit playing MMORPGs.

In no other genre has there been such a sharp and sudden decline in the quality of products. Not only that, but out of all the genres, MMORPGs had the most potential to do amazing mind blowing things. And they did, at first. Then after 2004 that all stopped.

Their has not been a sharp decline in quality Oh by god yes there has The quality is on par with other genres of gaming. There are a great deal of crap out there, but that is not unique to MMOs. No, what's unique to MMOs is when 100% of the AAA titles are all so identical to eachother that its hard to tell them apart. What is unique is the ever increasing snobbery and self entitlemnt of the player base. Yeah people tend to get upset when developers continuously make really bad games. i believe this is do to the intrensic nature of the internet and the fact that MMOs are directly connected with it. I think it has to do with the fact that we've had TWO MMORPG releases from AAA companies in the last 8 years that weren't shot for shot clones of WoW. TWO. Lets face it internet anonimity is the real issue if people had to face the consequances of the things they said then much of the attitude and problems with the internet and in turn MMos would go away.What is really amazing is the complete stupidity and idiocy(yes i actually said some people are stupid) people demonstrate in regards to WoW and many current MMOs. Well when you insult WOW you kind of insult them all considering how similar they are. not everyone apes WoW and even games that play similarly are different enough to not be WoW clones Ha, yeah I bet AoC, LotRO, and Rift aren't WoW clones with one gimmick thumb tacked on, right? . The WoW clones line is more of a myth than fact Incorrect.; WoW plays very similarly to early MMOs Holy shit you couldn't be more wrong. WoW is the antithesis of early MMOs. and what we see is just a continued evolution of the genres as a whole.

Evolution would be nice. But devolution is more accurate.

And this a great example of someone simply incapable of making an argument. i9nstead of ingaging my points you simply stuck your head in the air and declared "nanana boo boo you are wrong and I am right". I mean come on try to show how WoW is not similar to EQ. I did, you didn't quote it. WoW was very clearly based on EQ but the two had entirely different philosophies. What's more, EQ wasn't the only pre WoW MMO. What this really is is you your one specific ideal MMO has never been released It has, actually. so you get in a tizzy every time a new one comes out. other than really Rift and maybe even SW:TOR there have not been that many WoW clones You're forgetting WAR's PvE, LotRO, and AoC, aren't you? (and even those games have enought to destinguish them from WoW haha, no not really. Rifts had the event system from Tabula Rasa stapled onto their game, but that's about it. It may seem like enough to you, but those of us who are used to how vastly different each and every pre WoW MMO was from one another, it amounts to almost nothing. Hell, Rift even has the same UI and graphics as WoW. ). So please show me the WoW clones, actually explain how they clone WoW, then try to explain how that is any different from how WoW built off of EQ or any earlier MMOs.

All the MMOs I mention share the same class system (except Rift), the same type of gear grind, the same quest based leveling system, the same GUI, the same tiered raiding system, the same focus on instancing and singleplayer gameplay, the same lack of any kind of depth, same casual focus by putting in global auction houses, no death penalty, GPS auto maps that tell you how to do quests, sparkling objectives, !! over NPC heads... they're all cast from the same mold, and its very clear.

EQ had a similar class system to WoW (except all of EQ's classes had a TON of fluff abilities and player interdependent abilities) and WoW's raid system was based off EQ's raid system (both were terrible). That's about where the similarities end. EQ's world was without instances, focused on long long term leveling, group based content, shared content, player interdependency, immersion and player reliance over convenience, and each and every piece of the game just had more effort put into it. Quests in EQ involved actually typing and talking to the NPCs, there were little details in each system that didn't have to be there, more fluff in general. It feels like the difference between an adults house, and a house with a toddler in it, that has everything covered in safety gates and padded.

I quoted everything you typed, but it sure is nice to see you completely backpedaled claim that WoW and EQ had no similarities. As far as your other point they mount to the equivalent of "OH MY GOD THESE GAMES HAVE GRAPHICS AND QUESTING!!!!MUST BE A WOW CLONE!!!!"

<sigh> so short sighted... no, they copy WoW's mechanics point for point, therefore they are WoW clones. And I never said they were nothing alike, I said the philosophies of both games are the antithesis of one another, and you did NOT quote it.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by smh_alotI didn't read the articles - will do so later - but hmm, I don't know. Personally, I think we'll see a new dawn for MMO's after years of 'dark ages' in a sense.

When WoW goes down (please note fanboys: not saying that's any time soon, merely recognizing the inevitability), we're going to have a hungry herd the likes of which we've not before seen.

You can probably sell the Eskimos some ice cubes, when conditions are just right.

Why? There's like, 8 other WoW clones they can go to that give them the same/better experience.

Zynga is awash with investment dollars. The problem is that the consuming public is changing. Facebook has become a place to list more than a place to live. It's novelty has worn off, and other services like Twitter vie for the consumer's attention. As a result, there are very few places where Zynga can go that haven't already been tapped by Zynga.

People have been bullish on phones. Here's my thought. Most of the problems you see in social networking games are also there in phone games, because the quality and longevity aren't that good. It may get better, in time, but seeing how the advantage of the phone (it's portability) is hardly ever utilized, we have to wonder whether phone apps are just "cheap alternatives" to high-quality, established entertainment options (the console, the PC). This market is already really saturated, and it's harder--much harder--for a consumer to navigate the field of apps with vastly varying quality.

With everything I've seen, I don't believe high-end, high quality gaming is going anywhere. Do I think high-end, high quality gaming will change? It's been changing for some time now, but the appeal of gaming on the big screen, or gaming at the desk will not go away.

__________________________"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."--Arcken

"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.

"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE

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Certainly not going to be a drought in the next year. Titan is also on the horizon.

I do think new AAA MMOs are in trouble though. It's just too expensive and you really need to get so many things right. They will be released much less frequently in the future until someone blows the lid off and finds a formula to match WOWs ten million players..

There is no "magic formula" and people should stop trying to find one. One's big success was almost entirely timing based. It was the first MMORPG from a well established dev with a huge fan base and the first one to spend a year on marketing to non MMO players pre launch.

Once that audience is hooked you can't catch them again. WoW keeps going through momentum, not its "formula". Its Formula is the same as EQ's.

Over the years Blizzard has shown they don't know anything about running an MMO, so I wouldn't expect much from Titan.

AAA MMORPG devs would do much better if they scaled back their budget a bit and started aiming at the untapped "niches" out there, like the hardcore MMORPG player base, or the sandbox players. Look at how much Dark Souls had by making an incredibly hardcore game and aimed it at an untapped market. That's how WoW succeeded, being the first big budget casual game.

The next big success will be one that finds a way to bring in a large group of people who have never been interested in MMOs, which is something WoW did to hit such a high success.

The biggest problem with the MMO genre is that it is still regarded as something for only geeks and nerds. The video game industry as a whole was like this for quite a long time. One of the biggest changes to that view was the XBox and Playstation along with the big sports franchises, since sports weren't nerdy. Suddenly all of these people who though gaming was stupid now thought it was amazing.

It is why I used to laugh so much when people who had never gamed, but had picked up an original XBox and were just discovering the world of gaming, were talking about how amazing, unique, and innovative this Halo game was. When in reality it did nothing new, it was just the first major FPS that was shown to a crowd that used to think gaming was dumb so they missed all the other FPS games.

Truth is this will never happen because it isn't that straight forward. The MMO genre will evolve into something that doesn't resemble what we've seen and may not be as deep or as serious as we're used to. But at the same time that will make it far more accessible to an audience who only know of MMOs because South Park, or some other show, made fun of WoW users.

Until that day the genre will shrink down, companies will move away from it and investors won't touch it. Then once someone finds the recipie to this crossover game everyone will rush back in, flood the market, kill the quality and we'll be right back to where we were.

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I don't know. If I was a publisher I wouldn't be looking to make a MMO simply because of the number of new and in development titles there are out there plus MMOs are either hit or miss and TOR has shown that even $200million (I still cant wrap my head around that) doesn't guarentee success. It would be a case of wait and see. Plus there are technological changes in the area of gaming in mobile, handhelds and internet TV and other things as well as the PS3 and Xbox comming to the end of their life cycles. There are so many markets available for developers that it's no surprise if they take a breath.

Zynga is awash with investment dollars. The problem is that the consuming public is changing. Facebook has become a place to list more than a place to live. It's novelty has worn off, and other services like Twitter vie for the consumer's attention. As a result, there are very few places where Zynga can go that haven't already been tapped by Zynga.

People have been bullish on phones. Here's my thought. Most of the problems you see in social networking games are also there in phone games, because the quality and longevity aren't that good. It may get better, in time, but seeing how the advantage of the phone (it's portability) is hardly ever utilized, we have to wonder whether phone apps are just "cheap alternatives" to high-quality, established entertainment options (the console, the PC). This market is already really saturated, and it's harder--much harder--for a consumer to navigate the field of apps with vastly varying quality.

With everything I've seen, I don't believe high-end, high quality gaming is going anywhere. Do I think high-end, high quality gaming will change? It's been changing for some time now, but the appeal of gaming on the big screen, or gaming at the desk will not go away.

The problem with Zynga is the same problem with phones and tablets so when they say they're looking into phones they're far too late.

They jumped onto the casual game bandwagon. With facebook and smartphones, all of these people who had never gamed suddenly found these little games. Just as all of us did when we first encoutered video games, they were amazed. So they went nuts and bought lots of little $2 games or planted crops on a farm.

Companies like Zynga saw this and flooded the market with games (in Zynga's case almost all of which were complete ripoffs of existing games so it is even nicer to see them crumble. Then again angry birds is a rip off of the catapult games that have existed on flash gaming sites for years). The quality got worse, the sheer number went through the roof. So suddenly companies weren't seeing these huge profits that the first few people into the market saw.

Same happens with every new medium. When XBox launched the indie arcade, the first few people to through a game up there made good money because there was no choice and it was something new. The rest of the people jumping in didn't do as well. Hell there's that guy whoon every new platform releases the fart noise maker and sells millions of copies.

I think we'll see a lot of crappy companies die off and that will help get rid of a lot of the lower quality stuff. A few more solid companies will rise from the dust and we'll see some pretty decent things come out on tablets, phones, and even facebook.